#thingsthatare

[1001pagesofsummerreading]

Dust on Earth makes green less green and glass less glassy and thus subtracts quintessence. An angel covered in dust looks like a lump.

p 145, from “Twinkle Twinkle” in Things That Are

[1001pagesofsummerreading]

People who are afraid of heights would do well to remember that if you just climb high enough, you can reach a point where you are no longer in danger of falling.

p 129, from “Stairs” in Things That Are

[1001pagesofsummerreading]

Maybe some people's minds are like libraries, with memories like books, and even if the exit were left open the memories would still be sitting on their shelves in alphabetical submission. Maybe some people's memories are like furniture, useful: chairs to sit in and desks to work at and urns to bequeath; and maybe among many normal memories, some people have an unsnuffable flame, which eery several years gets aggravated and burns the whole mind down. You haven to have one of those minds inhabited by memories like wild animals, with wandering ways of their own: diffident giraffes, changeable mice, milling birds, clamoring turtles, a few that harry you and many multitudes that skirt you.

p 121, from “The Safari” in Things That Are

[1001pagesofsummerreading]

[1001pagesofsummerreading]

You wonder what it would be like if your memories were to go afield again, unpoliced, set free from their subjugation to Biography, free once more to haunt wheresoever they would. You impetuously take your skeleton key and run through the zo unlocking the cages, throwing open the main entrance, liberating the captives to hie themselves to the greenness of groves and the concealment of burrows and to the air, if they are winged. And then you follow them out, putting yourself at the mercy of memory.

p 118, from “Safari” in Things That Are

[1001pagesofsummerreading]

...are you not aware that most butterflies, after they have acquired wings, only live for two weeks or less? That they spend months or even years as eggs and caterpillars and pupae? This is why you haven't felt that fluttery feeling in such a long time... the life cycle of the butterfly is protracted. If you really do live for butterflies, as you say, and provide your thoracic cavity as a butterfly garden, you must be patient and remember that you are living for their eggs, as well, and for caterpillars, which can wait for years before they emerge as butterflies to give you a few days of fluttery feeling and then die, or migrate.

p 96-97, from “You Are going to Fly” in Things That Are

[1001pagesofsummerreading]

The man-of-war, for example, appears to be one individual, like Leo Tolstoy; but it is actually many individuals living together as a colony, like Leo Tolstoy.

p 87, from “Please Do Not Yell at the Sea Cucumber” in Things That Are

[1001pagesofsummerreading]

There are things you can do forever. Given a deep enough shaft, you can fall forever. You can forget forever, and disintegrate forever, and you can laugh for a very long time. But you cannot bleed for long-- not you, not citruses, not twites on treepies, not orangequits or plushcaps or jewel-babblers, nor any creature whose vessels flutter with warm, swirling, cell-bearing plasma. Either your leak will mend or you will become void. Only love can bleed forever; only love has endless blood. Only love's slender drooping tassels can bleed yet grow stronger, bleed yet grow brighter; redder, redder, never spent, never phantasmal-gray.

p 78, from “Love” in Things That Are